Third in a LIFE Series:
'Great Adventures'

Seeking the Magic
Mushroom

(click image to zoom)

A New York banker goes to Mexico's
mountains
to participate in the age-old rituals of Indians
who chew strange growths that produce visions

By R. Gordon Wasson

The author of this article, a vice president of J.P.
Morgan & Co. Incorporated, together with his wife,
Valentina P. Wasson, M.D., a New York pediatrician, has
spent the last four summers in remote mountains of
Mexico. The Wassons have been on the trail of strange and
hitherto unstudied mushrooms with vision-giving powers.
They have been pursuing the cultural role
of wild mushrooms for 30 years. Their travels and
inquiries throughout the world have led them to some
surprising discoveries in this field in which they are
pioneers. They are now publishing their findings in Mushrooms
Russia and History, a large, richly illustrated
two-volume book, which is limited to 500 copies and is
now on sale at $125 (Pantheon Books, New York).

N the night of June 29-30,1955, in
a Mexican Indian village so remote from the world that
most of the people still speak no Spanish, my friend
Allan Richardson and I shared with a family of Indian
friends a celebration of "holy communion" where
"divine" mushrooms were first adored and then
consumed. The Indians mingled Christian and pre-Christian
elements in their religious practices in a way
disconcerting for Christians but natural for them. The
rite was led by two women, mother and daughter, both of
them curanderas, or shamans. The proceedings went
on in the Mixeteco language. The mushrooms were of a
species with hallucinogenic powers; that is, they cause
the eater to see visions. We chewed and swallowed these
acrid mushrooms, saw visions, and emerged from the
experience awestruck. We had come from afar to attend a
mushroom rite but had expected nothing so staggering as
the virtuosity of the performing curanderas and
the astonishing effects of the mushrooms. Richardson and
I were the first white men in recorded history to eat the
divine mushrooms, which for centuries have been a secret
of certain Indian peoples living far from the great world
in southern Mexico. No anthropologists had ever described
the scene that we witnessed.
I am a banker by occupation and Richardson
is a New York society photographer and is in charge of
visual education at The Brearley School.
It was, however, no accident that we found
ourselves in the lower chamber of that thatch-roofed,
adobe-walled Indian home. For both of us this was simply
the latest trip to Mexico in quest of the mushroom rite.
For me and my wife, who was to join us with our daughter
a day later, it was a climax to nearly 30 years of
inquiries and research into the strange role of
toadstools in the early cultural history of Europe and
Asia.

AUTHOR WASSON sits in New York home with recorder,
mushroom pictures and "mushroom stone." A
onetime newspaperman, he took up banking in 1928.